everything I'd promised everyone I'd be, well I just ain't
by PurpleHipposRock
Summary: The team would be dead a dozen times over were it not for Grant Ward, even if they didn't know it. A Grant Ward Redemption Story. I don't own Marvel; title belongs to Panic! at the Disco - "Oh Glory".


Trip put down the first man easy, left hook into the gut, right hook into the jaw, a twist of a wrist and a crunch of bone, and the man was down with a fist to the temple and likely to stay down. The second man wasn't so easy, and after a desperate struggle he managed to get a hold of the man's gun and shoot him with it, mentally cursing the entire time, Director Coulson's orders having been to minimise casualties, and if Trip could have taken him down with an ICER, he would have, but he had given Skye his own ICER after hers had jammed.

(Fitz would have denied the possibility of such a thing happening, but he was still in a hospital bed in the Playground, recovering swiftly after the use of medicine that had been left on the doorstep of the base with instructions to "Use this on your man". Coulson had assumed that they were from Former Director Fury and after Simmons had run quick tests and Skye had found footage of a man the same height and build as Fury dressed in a black hoodie, almost the same as the one that they had seen Fury dressed in before, dropping the small crate off, they had used the drugs on Fitz, who began to recover at a pace that rivalled Skye's on the GH-325.)

Suddenly, Trip heard the crunching of gravel behind him and knew that the only reason that they'd managed to sneak up on him was due to the struggle he had been in with the man he'd shot. He whirled around and immediately saw the black barrel of a pistol, and pulled the trigger on his own "borrowed" weapon, but was met with the click of an empty magazine. The man grinned at the sight of the defenceless specialist, but before Trip could even begin to try and create some sort of distraction, the man fell backwards, pistol falling from limp fingers. Trip immediately ran forward, kicking the pistol away, but the gesture was useless. The man was dead, a neat gunshot wound piercing his forehead.

'I found him!'

Trip whirled around to find Skye standing behind him, gasping out their location to the team through her communicator. She was holding his ICER in one hand, stemming the blood flow of a bullet graze with the other.

'When Ward said that a skin deep graze was nothing to worry about, I should've called him a liar,' Skye said, the first time anyone had mentioned her SO's name in the weeks since his incarceration and subsequent release after the World Security Council realised that they couldn't really imprison a man who didn't exist, and ordered them to let him go.

(Skye was still beating herself up over that one.)

'Are you okay?' Trip asked, taking a look at the graze on her left hip.

'I'll live,' she replied. 'Probably.' She stepped forward and peered at the dead man lying before them. 'Nice head shot.'

'Wasn't me,' Trip said. 'I didn't even hear the shot, either they used a silencer or it was a long distance snipe.'

Skye paused. 'Maybe it was May?' she suggested.

'Yeah,' he agreed absently. 'Look, will you let me just do a patch job on your hip? It's making me nervous.'

'It just stings, it's not so bad,' she protested, but let him stick a piece of gauze over it from the first aid kit he kept in one of the many pockets in his cargo pants.

'You're right, but I'd rather it didn't get infected,' Trip said sternly.

Suddenly, Skye began to laugh, a rather bitter laugh for her. Trip glanced up and gave her a questioning glance.

'I just realised,' she said, jadedly. 'Ward and I match, now. He got shot, right there, on the team's second mission, my first.'

'You were their first?' Trip asked with a smile.

'I said that too.' She paused, and then sniffed. 'Before everything went to hell in a HYDRA handbag, he'd be yelling at me right now, telling me how stupid I was to get shot.'

'It was a rather stupid thing to do,' Trip said. 'But since I'm only your co-worker and not your SO, I won't rag you about it. I'll let Coulson do it.'

'Well, that's one thing that will never change, Coulson ragging me about getting injured,' Skye laughed. Trip was not getting used to the bitter note in her laugh that appeared too often lately.

There were footsteps on the gravel, and both turned to see Coulson and May approaching them.

'Skye, are you alright?' Coulson asked, hurrying to her side.

'Just a graze, I'm fine,' she muttered.

Trip watched them approach, and frowned. 'Neither of you have silencers or long range rifles?'

'No reason to. ICERs are basically silent, and neither of us are trained as snipers,' May said, leaning over the man that Trip had managed to knock unconscious and tying his hands with a zip tie.

'I guess you tried to keep them alive,' Coulson said dryly.

'I killed that one, had to,' Trip said. 'He pulled a gun on me.'

'Why didn't you have an ICER?' Coulson asked.

'My fault,' Skye said, holding up the ICER. 'Mine jammed.'

'It happens,' Coulson sighed. 'Good shooting on the other.'

'I didn't kill him,' Trip said. He held up the gun he'd taken. 'Out of ammo.'

'Then who…?' Coulson asked.

'You didn't hear the shot?' May asked, standing at the dead man's feet and peering into the distance.

'No,' Trip said.

'That window in that apartment building looks like a good place for a sniper's nest,' May said. The building was a construction site, mostly built. 'I'll check it out.'

'Trip, go with her,' Coulson said. 'Skye, you and I are going to have a chat about not getting shot.'

Skye groaned, but her protests and excuses faded into silence as Trip followed May's purposeful, quick-paced walk up to the building.

'Up there,' was all May said, pointing to one of the higher windows.

Trip nodded in agreement, and followed the older woman into the building, climbing the flights of stairs as silently as possible so that if the sniper was still there, they wouldn't startle him into running or shooting them.

But when they found the window that the sniper must have fired from, all they found were two men, unresponsive and tied together with zip ties.

Trip checked them over quickly. 'Unconscious, not dead. Definitely not ours.' The men's personal possessions had been taken from them, including a couple of dendrotoxin grenades, a couple of radios, two wallets, four handguns, and five knives, and piled on a table out of reach of the men. 'HYDRA, if the Cybertek weaponry is anything to go off of.'

May looked at the dendrotoxin grenades. 'Fitz will have a field day reverse engineering these.'

'Are you kidding? He'll make them even better,' Trip said with a smile.

'These men are definitely not the one who saved you,' May said, frowning. 'There's no sniper rifle here.'

'They were probably here for surveillance,' Trip said. 'Put up high, could see every angle, every entrance.'

'So someone came in here, knocked them out without giving them a chance to alert anyone else, and then saved you with their own sniper rifle?' May asked.

'Or these guys were on sniper watch, one the sniper, one the spotter, and when whoever saved me was done here they took the gun with them?' Trip suggested.

'Whoever it was, you owe them,' May said dryly.

'I have to say, whoever it was is a spectacular shot,' Trip said, taking out his own scope from a pocket in his bullet proof vest and peering through it through the open window. '500 meters, crosswind and you can barely see where he was standing when he was shot.'

'Well, if he's an asset, maybe we'll pick him up if we ever find out who he is,' May suggested dryly.

Trip nodded and smiled. 'Sounds good.'

'We should go,' May said, and left the room without further words.

Trip sighed and stepped back from the window, but a small clatter made him look down. A shiny gold bullet casing sat near his toe, and he bent down and picked it up, looking at it carefully. 'Huh. Pretty careless not to police his brass.' He looked it over before tucking it into his pocket and following May out.

::

'Do we know who our mystery protector is?' Simmons asked, taking the grenades from Skye. Fitz stood at his own bench scowling at the broken ICER, quickly taking it to pieces.

'No clue,' Skye said, perching on one of the lab benches, wincing slightly at the pain in her side. 'Trip found a shell casing, and the guy took out a couple of theirs, so he's definitely on our side, but we've got no clue who he is.'

'Or she. It could be… Agent Romanoff,' Simmons suggested, rolling up Skye's shirt and applying liquid stitches to the graze after pulling off Trip's temporary bandage and disinfecting the wound.

'Or Agent Barton,' Fitz offered. 'Trip said that it was a tricky shot. Ooh, unfired grenades, lovely.' He took one and immediately started poking at it.

'Should he be allowed to do that?' Skye asked nervously as Simmons put a clean bandage on over the wound.

'Trip disarmed them before he gave them to us,' Fitz said lightly. 'There's minimal risk. Perhaps it was Fury that shot the guy. He never said that he wasn't going to stick close.'

'I thought Fury was in Europe, taking down HYDRA cells. What about the Winter Soldier?' Simmons suggested suddenly.

'What about him?' Fitz asked, sliding the end of a screwdriver into a gap in one of the seams of a grenade, broken ICER abandoned on the bench behind him.

'He's supposed to be a very good shot, and we know that he actually exists now,' Simmons said. 'We saw the footage of Washington DC.'

'Yeah, but the Winter Soldier doesn't know that we exist, and anyway, he tried to kill Director Fury and Captain America, so why would he save Trip?' Skye asked.

'Thanks for that,' Trip said dryly, walking in. 'Coulson wants you, Skye.'

'Yeah.' She hopped off of the bench and walked up stairs, limping slightly. She walked into the situation room, trying to mask the limp as much as possible. 'Hey, AC, Trip said you wanted me.'

'Normally I would ask May to do this, but she's occupied with the interrogation of our temporary guests,' Coulson said dryly from where he was looking over the footage of the building that they had raided for evidence of who their saviour was.

Skye blinked in confusion. 'What exactly do you want me to do?'

Coulson smiled sheepishly. 'We need food.'

'You want me to go grocery shopping,' Skye said flatly.

'Well, yes. And not just snack food or microwavable meals, Skye, actual food,' Coulson said, handing her a bundle of bills and a shopping list wrapped around them. 'That should be enough for a week's worth of groceries for the team.'

Skye nodded seriously. 'Okay.' She walked out of the situation room, but paused when Coulson called her name.

'And Skye? Limit the amount of pop-tarts you buy,' he warned.

'You got it AC,' she said with a grin, and left the Bus with a pocketful of money and a list of groceries.

She walked through dark alleys mainly, to avoid any security cameras. There shouldn't have been a photo for comparison on facial recognition should she be caught be a surveillance camera, but May had hammered it into her: don't risk it.

(Skye was willing to admit even she wasn't infallible.)

She could hear footsteps behind her, but she could tell that it was only a single person, probably a man, and she hoped that as long as she didn't stop and make herself a target, she wouldn't be harassed by him.

(Now was a terrific time to remember that Fitz still had her broken ICER, and she'd given Trip his back. Shoot.)

(Pun intended.)

She was never that lucky.

The footsteps were at the same pace as her own, but the man had at least six inches of height on her, and his stride was much longer. She hoped that he'd just overtake her, ignore her and get on with his business, but that hope died when he stopped abruptly in front of her and whirled around, knife in hand.

'Hand over any money, honey, and no-one gets hurt,' he said calmly.

Skye knew that there was no way that that was happening. Money was short on the Bus, most of it went into refuelling and maintenance of their flying home, and although Coulson had access to an off-the-books SHIELD account and Skye herself had no qualms about siphoning off money from some of Ian Quinn's more obscure off-shore accounts, jet fuel was expensive. And food. Clothing. The motels, back when HYDRA had the Bus.

(And they definitely weren't being paid anymore. Definitely not a regular salary. Rounding up HYDRA as a terrorist organisation really did not pay very well at all.)

'Nope,' she said, staring him down. She'd taken on Ian Quinn and a gun and survived (twice). She could take down an untrained mugger with a knife, right?

(_You're gonna die, and leave us hanging out to dry, you know that? You're going in with no self-defence skills._)

'What're you gonna do, then, sweetheart? If you scream, no-one's gonna hear you,' the mugger taunted, pulling his face into an ugly sneer.

'I have a few tricks up my sleeve,' she snapped back, and almost vomited at the memory of the last time she'd said those words.

(Dammit, Ward.)

He darted forward without warning, and Skye jumped back, narrowly missing being stabbed in the side. She felt a sharp pain, though, and internally sighed.

(There go the stitches.)

She struck out with a fist, but the mugger got lucky, and ducked at the right moment, leaving her punching air. He came up and struck out with the hand not holding the knife, and caught her in the mouth. She could taste coppery blood spilling from a split lip, and caught off guard, couldn't stop the man from raising the knife for a more lethal blow.

(Hope Simmons didn't use all the miracle drugs on Fitz.)

And then, there was a crack of a rifle nearby, and the man staggered backwards, dropping the knife and putting a hand to his chest. Skye took initiative immediately, kicking the knife away under a nearby bin before stepping forward to check on the man, bleeding from what was clearly a gunshot wound to the heart, but even as she bent to check for a pulse, he stopped breathing and she felt for a pulse in his wrist and throat, but couldn't find it in either.

'SKYE?!'

She looked up to see Coulson and May running up to her, probably alerted by the gunshot.

'He tried to mug me,' she said, stepping back from him before beginning to shake. 'He had a knife, and he wanted my money, and-'

Coulson was there immediately with an arm around her shoulders. 'It's okay,' he whispered. 'It's okay. You're okay.'

She began to cry, little choking sobs.

'You're okay now, Skye. Here, just give me the gun so I can secure it,' Coulson said calmly, gently squeezing her shoulder.

She looked up at him unsteadily, tears streaming down her cheeks. 'That's the thing. I don't have one.'

May looked up at her from where she was checking the man's pulse. 'What?' she asked sharply.

'It wasn't me that shot him,' she said, looking up at Coulson. 'I swear. I didn't mean to go out unarmed, I just forgot that I didn't have my ICER, because mine jammed and I gave Trip back his because I thought that because we were on the Bus, we were safe, and I didn't mean-'

'May,' Coulson said lowly, cutting off Skye when he noticed the older woman's head shoot up, as if she'd glimpsed something.

'Movement on that rooftop,' she said quietly, nodding to the opposite roof. 'It's the right angle.'

Coulson nodded. 'Go. I'll get Skye back to the Bus.' He gently nudged Skye back in the direction of the Bus, pushing his handkerchief into her hands. 'You're not hurt, are you?'

'I think I ripped my stitches,' she admitted, slightly more calmly than before. 'Sorry, AC, but I don't think I can go shopping.' She handed him back the money with a shaky hand.

He cut off a sigh and instead took the money. 'It's okay, I'll send Trip and Simmons later. I shouldn't have sent you off on your own.'

He and Skye's conversation faded into the city's background noises as May silently climbed a rickety fire escape to the top of the building she thought she'd seen movement on. She looked around just in time to glance the head of a dark figure disappear off of the other end of the building, presumably onto another fire escape. She ran across the rooftop and looked over to exactly where he had disappeared, but there was no fire escape, just people looking around amongst themselves as if surprised, and a single running figure dressed in black in the crowds in the distance. May shook her head, completely sure she wouldn't be able to catch him, not with his head start, and instead went back to where he'd been perched, seemingly keeping an eye out for Skye.

The only thing left was a single bullet casing.

May sighed and picked it up before descending back down the fire escape and heading back to the Bus.

Skye was sitting back on the bench in the lab, and Simmons was re-stitching the girl who was still shaking like a leaf, despite Trip's warm hand on her shoulder and Coulson standing beside her on her other side, lending her quiet strength.

'A present from your saviour,' May said, throwing the shell casing to her.

Skye reacted too slowly, but Trip snatched it out of the air before it clattered to the floor and examined the bullet casing. 'Huh.' He pulled out a shell casing from his own pocket and compared them. 'Check it,' he said, leaning over Skye to show May and Coulson. 'Same markings.'

They compared the markings that were left on the two shell casings and nodded.

'Same guy that saved you,' May said to Trip.

'So, what, we have a guardian angel with a rifle?' Skye asked, nodding to Simmons in thanks and tugging her shirt back down, getting control of her shaking fingers.

'Apparently. Did you get a look at him?' Coulson asked May.

'He jumped off of the building just as I got there, disappeared into the crowd,' May said.

'He?' Trip asked.

'Definitely a he,' May said. 'I last saw him running south on High Street. Maybe you can try and get footage of him?'

Skye checked her phone. 'Footage from about fifteen minutes ago? Should be easy. There's traffic cameras along there, and a couple of ATMs that I can hack, easy.'

'Good,' Coulson said. He handed the bundle of money and shopping list to Trip. 'You and Simmons go.'

Trip nodded and made sure both he and Simmons had ICERS before walking out of the Bus.

'I'll go work upstairs,' Skye muttered, hopping off of the lab bench and walking out.

'She'll be okay,' May said calmly to Coulson. 'She's just shaken.'

'It seems a bit more than that,' Coulson said with a frown. 'I'm gonna go talk to her.'

'I'll continue my chat with our prisoners,' May said, walking out of the lab.

Coulson went up the stairs and into the main area of the Bus, finding Skye in the situation room.

'I've found three traffic cameras and two ATMs with cameras with views of the street near the building that May says he jumped off of,' Skye said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and leaning on the edge of the table.

'You okay?' Coulson asked.

She looked up at him tentatively. 'Not really?'

'What happened out there?' he asked.

'I just froze. All I could think about was all those training sessions with Ward and I just froze and… he would've killed me, AC. He had a knife, and if whoever took the shot hadn't, I'd have another scar to add to those that Quinn gave me.' Her lower lip quivered and Coulson didn't hesitate, stepping further into the room and putting an arm around her.

'It's not your fault. You definitely weren't expecting it,' Coulson said.

'Yeah, but… all those months, training with Ward. I should be able to take down a random mugger. Heck, I've taken down random muggers before.' She sighed.

'Even May used to freeze up, in the early days,' Coulson said reassuringly. 'And Ward, more often than not I'd see him walking around the Hub or the Triskelion or the helicarrier covered in bruises or nursing broken bones during his first couple of years as an agent. It was a long time before he could carry off a mission absolutely perfectly. And you wouldn't have what we could call a traditional training, either.'

She gave him a small smile. 'Thanks, AC.'

'It's perfectly alright. At the moment, I just really want to find this guy and thank him for saving you and Trip,' Coulson said.

'Me and you both,' Skye muttered, going back to work on the footage. 'Oh, hey, did you see that?' She tapped a frame of footage and put it up on the big screen. A tall, definitely manly figure dropped off of the building (two stories, Skye noted) and into the crowd below, much to the surprise of the people surrounding him. He wasted no time, immediately running off down the street and out of sight. May appeared moments later on top of the building, but made no effort to pursue him.

'Have you got any other angles on him?' Coulson asked.

Skye checked the footage from the other cameras. 'Not any that are any better. He's either very lucky-'

'Or he knows where the cameras are,' Coulson sighed. 'Which is much more likely.'

'I'm just glad that he was there,' Skye said with a shudder. 'I don't know who he is, but I owe him a thank you.'

'We all owe him a thank you,' Coulson said, patting her shoulder. 'I'm going to go and check in with May. You'll be okay?'

'Yeah. You know me, AC.' She gave him a grin that almost convinced him, and he left.

::

'You know, AC, I'm flashing back to the last time you left us,' Skye said, motioning to Fitz and Simmons, 'in the back of the Short Bus.'

Coulson handed her a handgun. 'Do you know the difference between the safety and the magazine release?'

Skye narrowed her eyes at the gun before touching a switch. The magazine stayed in place. 'Yes,' she announced triumphantly.

'Then this situation is vastly different to the last time you were left in the back of the Short Bus with FitzSimmons,' May said dryly.

Trip raised his hand. 'I have two questions: why does Skye need to prove that she knows where the safety is, and why is this van called the "Short Bus"?'

'This van is called the Short Bus because that was what Ward named it the first time we used it, and Skye used to have trouble distinguishing between the safety and the magazine release,' Coulson said. 'Any other questions?'

'I have a feeling that there's an interesting story about the last time Skye, Fitz and Simmons were left in the Short Bus alone, but I'm also guessing that it can wait until after we finish here,' Trip said.

'Alright, let's move out,' Coulson said, motioning to the doors. 'You three, try and keep radio silence.'

'No asking about bathroom breaks, got it,' Skye nodded.

The three field agents got out of the van, leaving the three younger agents alone.

'Well… I don't know about you two, but I'm having flashbacks to the Akela Amador case,' Simmons said primly, helping Skye set up her laptops.

'And you guys still don't know how to disarm the eyes, so let's hope there aren't any cybernetic eyes this time,' Skye said dryly.

'Let's hope you don't forget which one the safety is this time,' Fitz shot back.

Skye checked her laptop, but there wasn't any trace of the signal that she needed to trace, and shook her head at them. 'No trace of it, yet.'

'Can they trace this back to us?' Simmons asked.

'Well, yeah,' Skye said.

'We're masking it as best as we can, but it wouldn't take very long to trace it,' Fitz said.

'Hey! The signal's back online,' Skye said, immediately beginning typing. 'Fitz, can you-'

'Yeah, I got it,' Fitz immediately said, beginning work on the other laptop.

'And I thought it was creepy when you finished _Simmons'_ sentences,' Skye muttered.

'What can I do?' Simmons asked nervously.

'Check outside, make sure no-one's coming,' Skye said, pointing to the window.

'On it,' she said brightly, sliding into the front seat. 'Goodness, Agent Triplett does have long legs.'

'Skye, what's this mean?' Fitz asked, pointing to his screen.

Skye leaned over and shook her head. 'Means they're tracing this. Simmons, get ready to move.'

Simmons accordingly moved the driver's seat so that she could drive the van.

Skye returned to her own laptop and brightened before touching her ear, activating her comm. 'AC, I've got a location for you, but they've also got our location.' She read off the coordinates.

'Good work, now get out of there,' Coulson said.

'Too late,' Simmons said nervously.

Suddenly, there was a gunshot, and Simmons screamed, ducking down in her seat. Skye and Fitz followed suit, but not before there was a second gunshot, and Skye saw blood sprayed across the windscreen.

'SKYE, FITZ, SIMMONS, WHAT IS HAPPENING?' Coulson hissed into his radio. 'Trip, go back.'

'No, wait, wait,' Skye said, peering up over the edge of the windscreen.

'Oh, my God, is that…?' Fitz asked, joining her in peering up over from behind the passenger seat.

'It's the same guy from New York!' Skye hissed.

'What?' Coulson asked in their radios.

'The guy from New York, the one that saved Trip and me,' Skye whispered. 'He's outside the van, and he's… annihilating these guys who are trying to attack us, whoever they are.'

'Are you sure?' Trip asked, coming onto the line.

'Same height and build as the man from the footage,' Simmons said, peering up over the steering wheel.

'Simmons, he's wearing the same hoodie as before,' Skye whispered.

Outside the van, the man dropped his rifle (obviously the one that he'd used three weeks ago in New York, and wasn't it convenient, him being in Chicago at the same time as them?) and engaged in hand to hand combat with the next combatant, taking a punch to the gut before getting an arm around the other man's neck and snapping it with a violent twist. The next attacker didn't even get a punch in before the hooded man's leg was hooked around his and he had his feet swept literally out from under him.

Another man was creeping up behind him, but the man in the hoodie was so intent on immobilizing the man he already had on the ground, he didn't notice him.

'Behind you!' Fitz yelled out, and the man whirled around, spotted the man and threw a knife at the sneaky attacker, hitting him square in the chest. He fell immediately, and the man in the hoodie knelt to deal with the last man that he'd knocked down by quickly and surprisingly mercifully snapping his neck with an efficient twist of powerful arms.

The hooded man paused, panting, hands on his knees, and Skye lowered her phone, having been using it to film him. He looked around the van, but he appeared to have dealt with all threats, and glanced at the occupants of the van. The hood of his sweater was pulled over so much that his face was hidden in shadows, but they all recognised his nod as the thanks that it was, for warning him about the last man, before running off into the streets of Chicago.

'Hey!' Skye scrambled over into the front compartment of the van and over Simmons before leaping out of the van. 'Hey! Wait!' She ran after the man, but he was faster, disappearing into the crowds in the street and Skye soon lost him.

'Damn it,' she muttered, finally drawing to a stop, before walking back to the van.

'Skye,' Coulson called as she approached.

'He was too fast,' Skye said, picking her way over a body.

'Left his rifle,' Trip said, picking up the rifle with the end of his sleeve pulled over his hand.

'He dropped it, engaged in hand to hand combat,' Simmons said.

'He was trained. Broke that guy's neck without breaking a sweat,' Skye said, pulling up the video on her phone and handing it to May.

May watched for a few minutes. 'He's trained. Maybe Special Forces?'

'Could be former SHIELD,' Trip said, pointing over her shoulder at the screen. 'We learn that move in basic Operations training.'

'Well, we have fingerprints, now,' Simmons said cheerfully.

'And we're even _more _in debt to this guy now, for saving your lives,' Coulson said, shaking his head.

'Again,' Skye added with a murmur.

Coulson patted her shoulder. 'And I really want to thank him for that.'

She gave him a rueful smile. 'You and me both.'

'Did you guys find the guy? The one that was broadcasting the signal?' Fitz asked.

'Oh, yeah, we kind of left him tied up back there,' May said casually.

'I'll go get him,' Trip offered, handing Fitz the rifle and jogging away.

'What kind of bad guy is he?' Skye asked, closing her laptops and tucking them away.

'The kind that does bad things for money,' Coulson said.

'Oh. They suck the most, because they _know_ that they're doing bad things and keep doing them anyways,' Skye said lightly.

'Yeah,' Coulson agreed. 'You three got what you need from here?'

'Well, we already know that these men belong to the man you've arrested,' Simmons said, cutting a section from one of the dead men's jackets and then pointing to the ID tags that hung around each man's neck, identifying their employer. 'And we definitely know who killed them, so there's no point taking their bodies. I'm just collecting the evidence that could help us identify our saviour.'

'I'm assuming he left evidence on that section of jacket, then,' May said, straight-faced.

'Oh, yes, he gripped onto it quite hard just before he broke the man's neck,' Simmons said cheerfully.

'I would think that that knife would have fingerprints on it,' Coulson said, pointing to the knife that had been thrown at the man who had attempted to sneak up on them.

'Oh, yes.' Fitz handed the rifle to Skye and gingerly extracted the knife from the man's chest, making a face at the blood that coated it.

'You're not gonna pass out on us, are you, Fitz?' Skye asked teasingly.

'Perhaps,' he said queasily, putting the bloody knife into a plastic bag. 'Can we go yet?'

'We're ready,' Trip said easily, appearing from behind the van, pushing a man who was both cuffed and gagged in front of him.

'Is the gag necessary?' Skye asked, wrinkling her nose at the man.

'He started screaming for help. I _told_ him it was useless, that all his guards were dead, but he didn't believe me and he wouldn't shut up, and do you know how irritating that is?' Trip asked with a grin.

Skye laughed. '_So_ irritating.'

'I'll put him in the back, then,' Trip said, winking at her before pushing the man away.

'Didn't police his brass, _again_,' May said, pushing a couple of bullet casings into Skye's hand. 'Same markings as the ones that we found before, matches the rifle.'

'He didn't have time to police his brass because he ran away.' Skye looked at the shiny pieces of brass in her hand before taking out another piece from her pocket and comparing them. 'They are the same.' She shrugged and put them all in her pocket before following May to the van. 'I'm just glad that he's decided he's on our team.'

May jerked her head in an indication that she thought Skye ought to get in the van. 'I just hope he stays on our team.'

The rest of the team clambered into the van, and Skye found herself almost half in Simmons' lap and half in the bad guy's lap.

'Don't try anything,' she warned him before turning to Simmons and asking her what she was going to do to try and identify their saviour.

::

'No, don't do that!' Simmons was found yelling at her computer in the lab.

'What's wrong?' Trip asked, coming in from the cargo bay where he had been working out.

'Skye made a database of fingerprints of who our mystery saviour could possibly be, based on his gender and the training that we know he has,' Simmons said, motioning to the computer.

'Sniper training and advanced close-quarter combat techniques,' Trip listed, using the back of his hand to wipe sweat from his eyes.

'Problem is that no-one seems to match,' Fitz said disgruntledly. 'And Skye included every country, every army, every agency and even people in prison, and there is no match. Not a single whorl or loop.'

'Not even a pinky,' Simmons agreed.

'But that's… that's impossible,' Trip said. 'What about private security?'

'Most of those guys are former military, but Skye made sure to include those who were not,' Fitz said, shaking his head.

'Black ops?' Trip asked.

'Well, that's what it has to be, right?' Fitz asked. 'If we can't find anyone else to match, well, you black ops sorts aren't supposed to exist most of the time, right?'

Trip chuckled. 'Yeah, pretty much. But even they usually have some sort of fingerprint or DNA stuff on record. And I would've thought someone like Skye would've just hacked any redacted records and gotten the fingerprints anyway.'

Skye appeared in the doorway. 'I did. Is there a problem, guys?'

'No match,' Trip said laconically, nodding to the computer.

She frowned. 'Huh. Well that sucks.' She shrugged and turned to leave.

'Wait, that's all you're gonna say? This guy saved your life twice and you're not curious to find out who he is?' Simmons asked.

Skye shrugged. 'If he wanted to be a hero and tell us who he is, then he'd come to us and tell us. Sure, I'd like to know, but we've done all we can, and… he's obviously taking extra measures so that no-one does find out his identity, so maybe we should give him his privacy.'

'Who are you and what have you done with Skye?' Fitz and Simmons asked in unison.

Trip snorted with laughter. 'They make a good point. They did it creepily, but they did make a good point.'

Skye shrugged. 'This guy wants to save my life? I have no problem with that. He wants his privacy? Well, it's not hurting anyone, so I don't see the harm. Coulson wants to see you guys.' She turned on her heel and left.

'That was… strange,' Simmons said.

'And yet, she made sense,' Trip said reluctantly before getting up to follow her.

'It's always so strange when she does that, and yet, it always feels as though it shouldn't be,' Fitz sighed before following them up out of the lab.

::

'He told us everything,' Coulson said, motioning to the footage of their villain of the week on the big screen. 'There's a compound in Massachusetts, he says that if we can get in, we'll find a big store of HYDRA weaponry, big enough to put a pretty big dent in their plans if it goes missing.'

'Or up in flames,' Trip muttered.

'That's preferable, yes,' Coulson said with an indulgent smile in Trip's direction. 'We're going to need all hands on deck for this operation.'

'I don't like the sounds of that,' Fitz muttered.

Coulson ignored him. 'May, Trip, Simmons, you'll be going in through the front door making lots of noise and generally being distracting.'

'Oh, that sounds like fun,' Simmons said cheerfully.

Coulson stared at her. 'You've been spending too much time with Skye. Skye and I will infiltrate the compound via the back door,' motioning to Skye who pulled up the schematics of the building, 'plant explosions in key weaknesses of the building, which I hope, Fitz, you'll be able to identify, and then blow it all up.'

'Sounds like my kind of party,' Trip said, smiling broadly.

'You and I have a very different definition of "party",' Skye told him dryly.

'We'll be landing in six hours,' May informed them.

'Um… Agent May, if I'm not mistaken, in the Bus, the flight to Massachusetts should take less than an hour,' Trip said with a frown.

'Not when you're trying to avoid the Air Force, it's not,' May said dryly before walking off. 'I will be in the cockpit, trying to avoid getting arrested.'

'We can rig up some charges and figure out the best places to put them in six hours, easy,' Fitz said, looking at Trip and Simmons. The three seemed to communicate with a single glance before hustling down to the lab.

'Skye, have a seat,' Coulson said, pulling out a stool for her and a stool for himself.

'What's up, AC?' she asked, sitting down.

'Funny that, I was about to ask you that,' Coulson said dryly. 'Are you okay, Skye?'

'Kind of… not really?' Skye sighed, wilting under his gaze. 'It's just… we've been so busy that I haven't really had time to, you know, process everything that's happened. Half the time I expect to see Ward when I walk down into the cargo bay, or into the lounge, and when I don't… it just hits me all over again.'

'It's difficult,' Coulson agreed.

'I just… I just wish I knew why he did it, you know?' Skye said. 'I mean, I get that he had a crappy childhood, what with his big brother making him beat up his little brother and his big brother beating him up and his parents couldn't have been all that great, if all that was happening under their noses and they weren't stopping it, but that doesn't really explain why he turned into a evil-HYDRA-person.'

'I don't think "evil" is the right description for him, Skye,' Coulson gently berated her.

Skye looked over at him in confusion. 'Huh? Why not? He killed people, Coulson. People like Koenig. And Hand.'

'To be fair, Hand did send him on a mission without an extraction plan and didn't notify him of the fact until he tried to signal them and found that they weren't there,' Coulson muttered.

'Are you defending him, AC?' Skye asked.

Coulson, paused, opened his mouth, and then shut it and shook his head. 'I think we have to think about the things that SHIELD did in the name of keeping the world safe, what _we've_ done for SHIELD and in keeping with SHIELD's mission statement… and some of the things I've done for SHIELD… are pretty comparable to some of the things Ward did for Garrett.'

'Garrett was dying,' Skye said quietly.

'So were you, once upon a time,' Coulson reminded her. She put a hand to her stomach, where two bullet scars resided. 'I made FitzSimmons break the law, read my classified level ten file, broke into a highly classified facility, killed two agents and then went on to destroy aforementioned highly classified facility, albeit accidentally, defying orders and breaking more than a few most likely international laws. If saving you came down to infiltrating an enemy organisation, I'd have done it. If it had come down to killing their agents in order to keep my cover, I'd have done that too.'

'You're justifying what Ward did,' she said, eyes wide.

'Yes,' Coulson said quietly. 'Do you know at what age Ward met Garrett? Not according to the official file.'

'Well, the official file says Garrett became Ward's S.O. when Ward was at the Academy, when he was twenty-one,' Skye said.

'But Ward first met Garrett at age sixteen.'

Skye frowned. 'Did SHIELD recruit that early?'

Coulson shook his head. 'Something not many people know about Ward – at age sixteen, he was sent to military camp. He received a letter from home one day, and that night ran away, stole a car and drove home before setting his home on fire. His older brother was in there, but survived, and was pushing to have Ward tried as an adult when Garrett found Ward in juvie, and made him an offer he couldn't refuse.'

Skye stared at him for a moment before shaking her head. 'Oh, my God.'

'Garrett broke Ward out and then left him to live alone in the woods with no shelter, food, clean water, tools or weapons, just a dog for company,' Coulson said.

Skye gaped for a moment before asking, 'If this isn't all in the official file, how do you know this stuff about him?'

'We questioned Ward under truth serum while we had him under arrest before we were told to let him go because he technically didn't exist,' Coulson said.

'But… but Garrett wouldn't have left Ward out there for all that long, right? Right?' she asked before trailing off.

Coulson was silent for a moment too long before caving and saying, 'Five years.'

'Five- _five_ years? Garrett abandoned Ward for _five_ years in the woods without any supplies?' Skye asked.

Coulson nodded, remembering the look of despair and grief on Ward's face as he recounted his past.

'During this time, Garrett was Ward's only contact with the outside world,' Coulson told her. 'It was also during that time that Garrett was badly injured by an IED and turned against SHIELD.'

'Well… that explains a whole lot,' Skye whispered.

'Uh huh,' Coulson agreed. 'It's hard not to be loyal to a man who saved you from serious jail time, and Ward saw Garrett as a father-figure.'

'Not just the loyalty, though. Ward's people skills, or rather, lack of people skills,' Skye said. 'No wonder he sucked talking to other people – he went five years of his life _not_ talking to other people. I feel bad for calling him a robot, now. Thanks, Coulson. Now I just feel… bad.'

'How do you think I felt when I found out? How do you think May felt when she found out she basically took away the voice of an abuse victim?' Coulson questioned. 'I saw that Ward's relationship with Garrett was strange, hell, basically all of level eight and up thought that there was something strange going on, the way Ward followed Garrett's orders like he was the second coming, and yet none of us questioned it.'

'But… abuse victim? His parents?' Skye asked.

'His parents. His older brother. Garrett.'

'Garrett? But… Ward was a grown man when he knew Garrett. Surely he wouldn't have let Garrett abuse him,' Skye protested.

'Garrett beat Ward,' Coulson said quietly. 'For the fifteen years Garrett had Ward, Ward was beaten, regularly. Hell, I think the time he spent on the Bus was the longest I ever saw him go without breaking a bone! We, the higher-level agents, just thought that Ward was accident prone, or too prone to risk-taking, but we didn't care because his success rate was so high, but then he didn't get hurt nearly as much on the Bus, but he was still just as successful, and… I should have seen it sooner.'

Skye reached over and placed a hand on his shoulder. 'It's not your fault, AC. None of us saw it either. And I came from the foster system – you'd think I'd be able to spot an abuse victim.'

'I think… I think if we knew the full extent of everything Ward was hiding, perhaps is _still_ hiding… I think Ward was a better operator than we ever thought,' Coulson said sadly.

Skye suddenly paled, as if a thought had struck her and badly disagreed with her.

'Skye?' Coulson asked, worried.

Skye slipped off of her stool and bolted to the bathroom, running past Simmons and Trip to get to the bathroom where she promptly began to throw up.

Coulson rushed after her, pushing past Trip and Simmons who had crowded by the doorway and into the bathroom, where Skye was pulling away from the toilet.

'I told him he made me sick, AC,' she said, taking the paper towel that he handed her and wiping her mouth. 'I told him that he was a monster.'

'You didn't know, Skye,' he said, ignoring Simmons and Trip, fussing at the doorway. 'He made his choices. He had his chances.'

Skye spat out the mouthful of water that she was using to rinse her mouth out and stared at him. 'What chances, AC? To give someone a chance, you have to know that something is _wrong_.'

Coulson sighed and shook his head. She was definitely right.

'We're going to be landing in five hours,' he said quietly. 'Get some rest.'

Skye silently walked out of the bathroom and Coulson followed, to answer the questioning looks from Simmons and Trip.

::

'Is everyone in position?' Coulson asked softly, looking over at Skye who seemed steadier than she had been earlier, but still guilt-ridden.

Fitz, who was back on the Bus, checked the holograph, which showed him the layout and security of the base and five red dots, each representing the tracker that was in each person's com-unit.

'As far as I can tell, yes,' he said, seeing three dots up by the front door, which hopefully represented Trip, May and Simmons, all armed to the teeth, and two by the back entrance, that were Coulson and Skye, armed with small but damaging bombs that would hopefully take down the HYDRA base.

'We're in position,' May said quietly.

'In three… two… one… mark.' Coulson quickly chanted, and set the fuse on the door-bomb at the same time that one of the others did the same on the front door. The two door-bombs blew at almost the same time, triggering loud alarms. Skye had previously disarmed the back door's alarms, and Fitz checked again, making sure that the guards were _only_ descending on the front doors, but he couldn't be sure, not having access to the security cameras.

'Rooms eight and seven infiltrated,' Fitz muttered to himself. The red tracking dots scattered into different positions in each separate room. 'They probably know that you're there,' he announced, nervously reaching over to the bowl of pretzels that he'd previously poured and nibbling on one. 'I can't be sure; I can't _see_ anything. There's only so much that I can do from here, sir.'

'It's okay, Fitz,' Coulson said quietly. 'How are the others doing?'

The trackers of the three attackers were moving all over the place in the front vestibule, indicating a fight of some sort.

'Fighting, as far as I can tell,' Fitz said. 'What about your end?'

'Clear so far,' Skye muttered. 'Fitz, we wanted one here, didn't we?'

Fitz checked the schematics. 'Yes. The southeast corner of that room, Skye.'

One tracker moved to the corner, while the other was obviously standing guard.

A little green light lit up on Fitz's tablet, signalling that one of the devices had been armed.

'Okay, you're done there,' Fitz said. 'Move into the next room. Do you remember the door codes?'

'Yes, _mum,_' Skye said dryly, and Fitz watched as their two tracker dots moved into the next room without hindrance.

'Room six infiltrated,' he murmured, making a dash mark on a piece of paper to join the first two.

'We're being swamped in here, Coulson, but I think there are a couple of guards coming your way,' May grunted, and there was the sound of tearing clothing and the hard collision of flesh on flesh before a pause. 'I saw two break off from the group and head in your direction.'

'I'll keep an eye out,' Coulson promised.

'Skye, you want to place the next bomb in the northeast corner this time,' Fitz direction, watching the schematics nervously, reaching for the pretzels again. Chewing was a nervous habit of his – and since going into the field _always _made him nervous, he was _always_ chewing and eating.

'What are we actually doing with these, Fitz?' Skye asked, arming the device.

'We're taking out a specific wall. I calculated that there was an 87.69% chance that if we took out that specific structural wall, the building would collapse,' Fitz said. 'Next room, and be warned, I have security notices that someone is coming through doors in a path that will overlap with your own.'

'It's okay,' Coulson said, and Fitz heard the sounds of an ICER being drawn and readied.

Fitz had purposely turned down the com-units of the other three members of the team, the ones drawing the attack, so that he didn't have to hear them get hurt, but he could hear Trip cursing like a sailor, could hear May cutting through the men with ruthless efficiency (ruthless efficiency that scared him, if he were honest, because if that was how she dealt with men that meant nothing to her, what exactly did she do to Ward?), he could even hear Simmons babbling in the way she did when she was stressed and while he wanted to try and talk to her, try and soothe her, he knew that she did not need to be distracted right now, and instead turned his attention back to Skye and Coulson.

'Where in this room?' Skye asked him, and he realised that they had moved to the next room.

'North-east again, and Coulson, they're only one room away,' Fitz warned. 'Room five infiltrated.'

There was the sound of a brief scuffle, and then Coulson cleared his throat. 'They're dealt with.'

'Oh, my God that was _amazing_, AC!' Skye squealed. 'You're as much a BAMF as May!'

'BAMF?' Fitz asked.

'Skye, can we do this later?' Coulson asked, slightly out of breath.

'Sure, AC.'

The device for that room was activated a minute later, almost simultaneously with the one that was to be placed in the front foyer area. The front team moved one room further in, the furthest they were supposed to go in, and drew the attackers into the smaller room, bottlenecking the flow of them and making them easier to deal with. The device was planted quickly, probably in a gap in the fray, before the three tracking dots were back in action.

'Room four infiltrated.' Fitz was nervous. This was all going much too according to plan.

'Door's already open,' Skye muttered in Fitz's ear and the two red dots moved into the next room.

'You're only two rooms away from May, Trip and Simmons,' Fitz warned. 'Room three infiltrated.' He looked at his piece of paper and quickly added another four dashes to the progress of the team.

'And we're on the look out for any guards,' Coulson assured him. 'This is going worryingly to plan.'

'Don't jinx us, AC,' Skye scolded.

'Southeast,' Fitz said briskly, reaching for a pretzel only to find that the bowl was empty. He began to bite at his pinky nail, despite the scolding that he faced from Simmons when she got back.

Skye set the device very quickly, and headed into the next room with Coulson. The sounds of fighting were still in the background, and that worried Fitz, because _how many bloody HYDRA guards were there supposed to be in one small arms warehouse in Boston_?

'Room two infiltrated,' he muttered, taking his mind off of the fighting and back to the task at hand, putting the second last dash down. One more tally-mark, and then all he'd have to do would be to wait for the team to get out of the warehouse and then remotely activate the devices once they were clear of the zone. _Simmons called them "bombs", but "devices" sounded so much more spy-ish and cooler._

There was a sudden thud from the background noise, and then an ominous pause before May reported, 'Simmons is down.'

Fitz bit back the torrent of questions that he had and instead turned his attention to his pinky nail, which was bitten to the quick and bloody, now. He switched to his ring finger.

'Second-last device is activated,' he reported instead when the light on his tablet turned green, and watched as Coulson and Skye moved into the next room. 'Room one has been infiltrated.' He made the last tally mark and allowed himself a breath.

Suddenly, there was a loud bang, and Fitz jumped, knocking the empty bowl to the ground. It shattered into pieces, but he didn't hear it over his own rapidly beating heart.

'Trip is down,' May said, sounding breathless.

Suddenly, the three trackers that were supposed to stay in the second-from-the-front room moved into the third room.

'Oh, God, Trip's been shot in the leg,' Skye said.

'Nothing vital,' May assured her. 'He's not bleeding enough for that. He knocked his head on the way down, though, which is why he's unconscious.'

There was a sudden scuffle.

'How many of these guys are there?!' Skye shrieked, from the sounds of it suddenly finding herself in hand-to-hand combat.

The muffled sound of an ICER being used soothed Fitz's frazzled nerves, but it didn't stop him from nervously chewing, switching to his middle finger's nail.

'I think they knew we were coming,' May said, probably to Coulson. 'There are too many guards, even if it is for a weapons' warehouse.'

Coulson swore, and there was a clatter, as if he had dropped his ICER. _Probably out of ammunition,_ Fitz mused.

Suddenly, Skye grunted and then groaned, accompanied by a disconcertingly loud and dull snap.

'Skye?!' he asked hurriedly.

She was silent for a moment before gasping out, 'Fitz, you can call them ICERs, you can call them Night-Night guns for all I care, I'm just glad that they work.' She swore, and then added, 'But they didn't stop the guy from breaking my leg. At least, that sounded like a break, and it's definitely hurting like a break.'

'Okay, I'll- I'll- I'll call an ambulance!' Fitz said, already reaching for the phone.

'No, Fitz!' Coulson yelled. 'We're fugitives, remember?'

'Oh, right,' Fitz muttered.

'I'll be a-okay, Fitzy,' Skye assured him. 'Once we get Dr Simmons up again, she'll patch me up.'

Fitz didn't feel assured by that. 'Just promise me that Coulson and May are okay.'

Skye looked up from her slumped position against the wall, taking out as many guards as she could with her ICER. 'They're kicking ass, Fitz,' she said faintly, despite the fact that Coulson was quickly becoming overwhelmed with guards and May was visibly tiring.

And then there was anther gunshot, and May cried out and fell, bleeding profusely from her shoulder.

'May!' Skye yelled, dragging herself over to the older woman and ripping a piece of cloth off of one of the guards' uniforms before using it to stop the bleeding.

'It's okay, Skye,' she assured her faintly, ignoring Fitz freaking out in their earpieces. 'Just a… just a flesh wound. Won't kill me. But I… I think I need to sleep.' She blinked a couple of times before closing her eyes.

'May!' Skye shook the woman's body, but she was properly unconscious now, and Skye could feel herself slipping the same way from due to the searing pain from her broken leg.

She watched with teary eyes as Coulson was overwhelmed with guards and he too dropped unconscious to the floor. Fitz was screaming in her ear to place the last device and get out of there, and Skye was _trying_, she really was, but she couldn't walk, and she had to get to the far wall to place the device.

(This was NOT how she wanted to die, she had _not_ survived being shot by Ian Quinn only to die in a HYDRA warehouse with no answers and no hope.)

Suddenly, though, the guards that had been converging on Coulson and herself and anyone looking remotely like they had a chance of surviving began to fall, one by one. They turned to their new attacker, but the new guy was fresh and skilled and… dressed in a dark, hooded sweater…

(Why couldn't he have come in just a couple of minutes earlier, eh?)

'It's the hooded guy, Fitz,' she managed to say, which calmed her panicked team-member for a millisecond before he began yelling again.

He took them down easily, shooting the first dozen attackers with a couple of handguns, bullets to their heads or hearts, accurate and deadly.

(Oh, right… _they_ had his rifle.)

Then he began to use the guns as hand-to-hand weapons, using them to bludgeon and disable, and Skye was awed by his skill. Soon, though, he discarded those too, and fought them with his hands and feet and cut through the swathe of guards like scissors through cloth.

The seemingly steady stream of guards was slowing, and there were only two left now, Skye idly noticed, ignoring Fitz's shrieks of panic in her ear. One was attacking the hooded man from the front, while the other kept trying to attack from behind, but with not much luck. Suddenly, though, the guard behind him snatched at him, and got a hold of the hood, and yanked on it.

And Skye felt as though all the air had been sucked out of the room.

'Ward.'

It was only a whisper, but he must have heard her, because he looked down at her at that exact moment, and he looked almost exactly the same except for a sharp scar on his right cheekbone.

Suddenly, he turned back to the guards and took them out with ease, just like she knew he could. Fitz was screaming in her ear, but the only thing in her mind was the bomb that still had to be planted.

(And wasn't that ironic, how despite the fact that her team was unconscious around her, that Ward had for some reason been protecting them from afar, despite all the questions that should have been filling her mind, the only thing she could think of was the mission. She could almost _hear_ Ward saying, "Finally.")

'Skye.' He knelt by her side, immediately checking her leg.

'You've got to put this in the corner,' she said, pushing the device into his hands.

'Bomb?' he asked quietly.

She nodded before tapping her ear. 'Fitz will detonate them once we… once we're clear.' She had to pause, then, and take a gasping breath to try and deal with the pain of her leg.

He placed it in the right place and activated it, and Skye dimly heard Fitz said, 'All the devices are activated. Get out of there!'

But she was rapidly blacking out, and the last thing she remembered before slipping away into the darkness was the feel of warm, strong arms lifting her and carrying her out.

Fitz watched in amazement as the last of the five dots cleared the building and got out of the blast zone, despite the fact that no-one was answering his calls. Instead, he processed what Skye had said, that the hooded man was _somehow_ Ward.

In the end, it did make sense. Sharp-shooting skills; well, Ward had been recruited to the team for that skill, and he had been renowned in SHIELD for being one of the best snipers that they had. The exceptional hand-to-hand combat skills – again, one of the most highly skilled operators that SHIELD had had. And no fingerprint matches? Skye had wiped all of Ward's history from the system, before they had found out that he had been HYDRA. Of course there weren't any fingerprint matches, and they weren't about to compare the prints to the ones that Ward had left on the Bus.

Suddenly, there was rustling in Fitz's ear, as though someone was removing their com-unit from their ear, and inserting it again.

'Fitz?'

The voice was gravelly, rough, lower than Fitz remembered, but he recognised it.

'Ward?' he asked quietly.

Ward grunted in reply before saying, 'Light it up.'

And Fitz happily did just that.

::

Fitz sat in between the two make-shift hospital beds that he and Ward had set up in the middle of the lab, keeping an eye on the two most seriously injured members of the team, May and Trip. Trip had been conscious for a while, and had talked Ward through digging the bullet out of his leg. May's injury had mercifully been a through-and-through, no digging required. Ward had packed both the gunshot wounds with gauze to prevent them from bleeding out and then had made for the cockpit, setting a course for the Playground after Fitz had told him about his own recuperation after being dropped into the sea.

Ward had _tried_ to ask for forgiveness for that stunt – Fitz had shaken his head and refused, saying that there was no need for forgiveness because Fitz knew that Ward knew that the medical capsule was supposed to float, and if Ward hadn't dropped them, he would have had to put bullets in their heads, and they had a much larger chance of surviving being dropped in the ocean, even if it was in a sinking medical pod, than of surviving bullets to the head.

Ward had said that that was a very logical way of looking at the situation, and didn't Fitz hate him? Even just a little bit?

Fitz had shaken his head. Not even a little bit. Simmons did, because Fitz had been the one hurt most badly, and if it had been the other way around, with Simmons being the one badly hurt, Fitz would probably be trying to kill Ward right now, but since they were all alright, there was nothing to forgive except the little matter of betrayal that, looking at it with the background information that they now had, wasn't even betrayal, really. It had been _survival._

Ward walked into the lab with a sigh and motioned to May and Trip. 'Have either of them woken up?' he asked. He voice was almost the same as before – a bit rougher, and sometimes it broke at the end of a long sentence.

'No,' Fitz said quietly.

Ward sighed. 'It's just as well, I s'pose. If they wake up, we've got nothing to help with the pain.'

Fitz nodded. 'We… we're running short on basically all medical supplies. Coulson doesn't say much, but we all know that we can barely afford to keep the Bus in the air.'

Ward nodded. 'I know. I've been following you-'

'For months,' Fitz said. 'You saved Trip, and then Skye.'

Ward shook his head. 'Longer than that. I, uh… When I was released, at first I didn't know what to do. Technically, I didn't exist. Makes getting a job problematic, but I didn't really need a job, because I had safe-houses everywhere. I had fake IDs, enough cash in several different currencies to make living… possible, if not easy. Fury approached me, not long after my release, asked for my help in taking down some HYDRA bases in Europe.'

'We thought that was Fury!' Fitz burst out when Ward paused to rest his voice for a moment. 'That was you too?'

'I helped him, yeah. For the first couple, it was really easy, because HYDRA still thought that I was on their side.'

Fitz paused and looked up at him. 'Are you? Still on their side?'

Ward looked down at his feet and sighed. 'I'm on no-one's side, Fitz.' With that, he began to move to the door. 'Skye's woken up,' he said, pointing at the screen that Fitz had been using to keep an eye on the other unconscious members of the team. And he walked out of the lab.

Skye's head shot up as the door to her bunk slid open.

'Hey, Skye,' Ward said softly, putting a couple of tablets and a bottle of water on her bedside table before hesitantly sitting at the foot of her bed.

'Ward,' she said, staring at him. '_You're_ the guy who's been protecting us?'

He gazed at her silently for a moment, smiling at her, before finally saying, 'After everything that's happened today, and that's the thing that you're focusing on?'

'Oh, no, I've got a million things that I want ask right now, but that was the first thing that popped in,' she said. She played with the edge of the blanket before glancing up at him. 'Thanks, by the way. For saving us. Tonight, and… all those other times.'

'Eh,' Ward shrugged. 'I don't think you should be thanking me. I should really be apologising. For playing with your feelings, for betraying you…' He sighed softly and trailed off into silence.

Skye was quiet for a few moments before looking up at him and grinning. 'So. Where are we going? We are in the air, right?'

'We're going to… the Playground? Fitz gave me the coordinates,' Ward said sheepishly with a small grin.

'Oh, okay,' she said, giving him a small smile. 'So, this is the real you? Vigilante justice, following from afar?'

Ward laughed softly. 'Just… doing what felt right. For once in my life.'

They both were silent for a moment before both opening their mouths.

'Skye-'

'Ward-'

They both stopped talking and looked at each other.

'I was a jerk,' Skye said quickly, before he could say anything.

Ward blinked. 'Funny. I was about to say the same thing. Actually, no, I was way worse than a jerk because I betrayed you, and I killed, and I lied and I did all manner of evil things that should have resulted in me being locked up for the rest of my life, if it hadn't been for Fury intervening.'

'Wait, you know about Fury?' Skye asked.

'He was the one that got me out of jail, the one that came up with the argument that because I didn't exist, they couldn't charge me with the crimes,' Ward said, looking oddly disappointed.

'You do not look like a man who gladly escaped a life sentence,' Skye said.

'I… I deserve to pay for my crimes, Skye. I did terrible things, and I need to atone for those things… but Fury thought I'd do better atoning for them by helping take down HYDRA, rather than living out the rest of my life in a prison cell,' Ward sighed.

'You've been helping to take down HYDRA?' she asked, frowning.

'The European bases, yeah,' Ward said. 'Fury needed agents who were ready to do whatever was necessary to take them down, and well… I fit that bill, and Fury made it absolutely clear that if I even _thought_ about switching sides again, he'd put me down himself, and then bring me back with GH-325, and then put me down again.'

Skye bit off laughter. 'That… sounds like the Fury that I met.'

'I spent the first few months helping him, but then it got to a point where I was no more use, because he was using me as a mole inside HYDRA, and there's only so many times you can pull that off before word spreads about you having turned sides,' he said softly. 'So Fury gave me the medicine for Fitz and put me on team-Bus protection.'

'You were doing that on Fury's orders?' Skye asked, frowning.

'I… Actually, Fury gave me the choice. Asked me what I wanted to do.'

'Hard choice?'

'I… I don't _make_ choices, Skye. At least, I didn't. Before. I had orders. Shortly after I took down my last HYDRA cell, Fury… well, I guess you'd say he put me on leave? And I spent the first three days sitting in my bunk doing absolutely nothing because… I didn't know it at the time, but Garrett conditioned me to not _need_. To not _want_ anything. You see, Skye, I knew Garrett since I was-'

'Sixteen years old,' she whispered.

He eyed her, but stayed silent.

'Coulson told me.'

He nodded sadly. 'So you know. He _appeared_ to be rescuing me from my family, but in actual fact-'

'He was just transferring you from one abusive home to another,' Skye said.

'And I was just a kid.' Ward's voice broke, and he gulped before continuing. 'I didn't know. I knew that this wasn't normal, but I wasn't getting beat up and I didn't have to beat up anybody else, so… I thought I'd finally escaped it.'

'But all that happened was that you switched from physical abuse to mental abuse. And he basically caused you to develop Stockholm syndrome.'

Ward looked at her. 'How do you know so much about it?'

She shrugged guiltily. 'Some of the time we're hunting bad guys, yeah, but… a lot of the time is down time, just waiting for something to happen… and Coulson is starting to act… weird… so I've basically just been reading up on a lot of mental illnesses, especially ones brought on by traumatic events.'

He nodded sadly. 'I… I'm not making excuses, though, Skye.' His voice was almost pleading. 'I did bad things. Very bad things. I don't… I'm not asking for your forgiveness.'

'And I'm not forgiving you. I don't know if I can ever forgive you for the things that you did to me, and to the people I care about,' she replied.

'I know. But maybe, one day, when this is all behind us and I'm a little less screwed up and you don't hate me as much as you do right now… maybe we could start over?' he suggested tentatively.

She smiled, her eyes glazed slightly with unshed tears. 'I'd like that. But I'd also like to clarify – I never hated you. I tried, I really did. You betrayed me, you betrayed my family, you hurt my family and you lied to me… but no matter how much I tried, I couldn't bring myself to hate you.'

He gave her a tremulous smile. 'I'd say what I was thinking right now, because the psychiatrist that Fury sent me to says that it'd be good for me, but I don't wanna ruin the moment.'

Skye laughed lightly. 'Oh, my God. Grant Ward actually recognising a "moment", and purposely choosing to not ruin it. I'd ask you "who are you and what have you done with the real Grant Ward", but I have the strangest feeling that I _am_ talking to the real one.'

He laughed softly before changing the subject before either of them could end up bawling their eyes out. 'So, you really should be resting.'

'Yeah,' she agreed. 'I've been trying to ignore it, but my leg really does _ache_.'

He sighed and pushed the tablets he'd set down into her hands. 'I had to reset your leg and put it in a splint myself. Fury dug up the research done into GH-325 – literally, he had like a gazillion terabytes of data buried in his coffin instead of his body and he made _me_ dig it up because he couldn't risk being seen, and one of the side-effects is that you will heal faster than the average human.'

Skye stared at him. 'You make it sound really scary when you phrase it like that.'

He laughed.

She tilted her head and watched him for a moment. 'The real you laughs and smiles a lot more. I like it.'

He stopped laughing, but didn't stop smiling. 'I reset your leg so that it wouldn't heal crooked, just in case you heal faster than any of us predicted. I'm sorry if I overstepped a boundary, or something, but I thought that if I did it while you were out, it would save you the pain.'

She gave him a small smile. 'Thanks.'

He shrugged. 'I better check the course. We're probably getting near. Take the painkillers.'

She rolled her eyes and shoved them into her mouth before dry-swallowing and taking the bottle of water he passed her.

'Happy?'

'Very,' he said. 'Bye, Skye.'

'Bye? You going somewhere, Ward?' Skye asked.

He paused on his way out the door. 'To the cockpit.'

'Then why are you saying goodbye?' she asked, stifling a yawn.

He gave her a guilty grin. 'Because one of those tablets was a sleeping pill.'

'Son-of-a-'

Ward closed her bunk door and laughed softly. She'd thank him eventually. Maybe.

::

Ward watched as they wheeled a sleeping Skye down the cargo ramp, and stopped one of the medics to tell him what he had given her. The young woman nodded and continued on to the medical bay.

'And she's allergic to strawberries,' Fitz said, to a young agent who was making quite a long list on his notepad. 'And she doesn't like Brazil nuts, because they're bland, and radioactive.'

The young man did a double take. 'Wait, what?'

'And she doesn't like banana flavouring, either,' Fitz said.

The agent sidled off while Fitz began listing the other flavourings that Simmons didn't like.

'Fitz, relax,' Ward said when Fitz paused to take a break, and put a hand on the younger man's shoulder. 'It's just a bump on the head. The exact same thing has happened to you – twice. Once from Simmons herself and once from Coulson. She'll be okay.'

Fitz grumbled under his breath before conceding that Ward's argument did make sense. He then realised that the ex-specialist was holding a rifle in his hands, and had a backpack on his back.

'What are you doing with that, Ward?' Fitz asked, nodding to it.

'Well, it _is_ mine, Fitz,' Ward reminded him. 'I dropped it in Chicago. You guys recovered it?'

'Yeah,' Fitz said. 'We tried lifting fingerprints off of it, but obviously… you haven't got any fingerprints on record because we were all erased.'

Ward smiled at him. 'Someone cleaned it,' he said, checked the clip. It also had a full clip of ammo, and he'd managed to find a few more in the armoury.

'Skye,' Fitz said absently.

Ward's head snapped up. '_Skye_ cleaned this? Is it safe to use?'

'She spent three hours on it, and had Trip check it twice, despite the fact that he told her that it was good enough the first time,' Fitz told him.

'Oh. Is Trip her new S.O.?' Ward asked lightly, but Fitz saw right through him.

'You still care for her,' Fitz said, ignoring the question.

'How could I stop?' Ward asked dryly.

Fitz frowned. 'May's her SO, but they don't really train very much anymore. We don't have much time for things like training.'

'Oh,' Ward said softly. 'Well, it was nice seeing you again, Fitz.'

'Whoa – you're not staying?' Fitz asked. 'But May and Trip and Skye are hurt, and-'

'Fitz,' Ward said calmly. 'Coulson and Simmons will wake up. May and Trip and Skye will heal, and… I will be there if you need me.'

'But… we do need you,' Fitz said.

'No. You _want_ me here,' Ward said softly. 'And that's not the same thing.'

He swung the backpack down onto the ground and quickly dismantled the rifle before putting it into the backpack. 'I got my stuff out of my bunk so that Trip can use it.'

Fitz immediately objected. 'No-one's used your room.'

Ward shook his head. 'Which is silly. Tell them to use the room, when they wake up. It's just a room. You're fighting a war, Fitz. There isn't room for sentimentality in war.' He picked up the backpack and slung it over one shoulder before walking down the cargo ramp and out into the wilderness.

'What are you doing, then? Are you fighting a war too?' Fitz called after him, just as he was about to step off of the ramp.

Ward paused, and didn't turn around. 'No. I'm surviving.'

And Fitz watched him walk away, until he couldn't see him anymore.

::

Eighteen Months Later

::

'Well, that was… exciting,' Skye said dryly, trudging back to the Bus, parked in an airport hanger in LAX.

Coulson glanced sideways at her, overstuffed backpack on her back, boots dragging against the tarmac in lethargy.

'It wasn't our most exciting case,' he allowed.

Skye snorted. 'AC, it was a fake.'

Coulson sighed and nodded. 'Yeah. It was. But there, that's what we get for believing what we see on the internet.'

'But the internet address _was_ hinky,' she protested. 'And you have to admit, those guys did give up their act a little too fast.'

(They'd barely shown their SHIELD badges before the three men pretending to be telekinetic had given up the act, revealing the cleverly rigged setups.)

'I think people are well aware of what happens to you if you're gifted and SHIELD gets their hands on you,' Fitz said dryly, huffing under the weight of his own overfilled backpack. 'Or at least, what _used_ to happen to you.'

'Fitz, did we have to bring all this stuff?' Trip asked, carrying both his pack and Simmons and doing it with enviable ease.

(It was times like these when Skye wished that Ward was still around. Ward probably would've taken both hers, Fitz's and his own pack and carried them without complaint, and wouldn't have given them back if any of them had protested. Not that Skye would have.)

'Well, we didn't know what we needed-' Fitz began.

'-as we've never dealt with a case of telekinesis before,' Simmons finished.

(They still finished each other's sentences. And occasionally Skye's, now, too. And Trip's. May's. Coulson's. Practically anyone in the team. They'd learnt to ignore it.)

'And now we still haven't,' Fitz said disappointedly.

'You don't have to sound so disappointed, Fitz,' Skye pointed out. 'If he'd been an evil telekinetic, we would've had no way to catch him, because he could just open the lock of a cell door, or redirect ICER bullets away from him and into one of us.'

Fitz blinked. 'I never-'

'-thought of that.' Simmons shook her head. 'I'm surprised you did, though.'

Skye shrugged. 'Just thinking about what I'd do if I had those powers.'

'What _you_ would do?' May asked quietly, and Skye almost jumped, having forgotten that the quiet woman was walking right beside her.

'Well… maybe there's some of the thought process of a certain former agent in there as well,' Skye allowed softly.

(They never mentioned his name. Not since he walked out of the Playground after saving them. And despite his protests, his bunk went unused. Trip said that he liked using the interrogation room as his bunk – it was roomier, which suited the tall man.)

May gave her a brief smile before glancing over her shoulder.

'Everything okay, May?' Coulson asked, not missing the gesture.

'Skye's right,' May said softly. 'It was too easy.'

Suddenly, she whirled around, ICER at the ready and already pointed at a man who was pointing a gun, a real gun, at the team. May didn't hesitate, she just fired.

Skye swore and just barely caught the backpack that May tossed at her.

'Get to the Bus!' she yelled, and when May yelled, Skye had learned, you did whatever she was yelling at you to do. Skye grabbed Fitz's hand and began to pull him to the shelter of the Bus, leaving Trip to do the same with Simmons, while Coulson covered May as she carefully approached the man she'd taken down.

They were almost at the cargo bay ramp when the sharp crack of a rifle being fired was heard, and a bullet narrowly missed Trip's head, ricocheting off of the Bus and into the side of the SUV.

'Thank God that missed Lola,' Fitz gasped out as Skye shoved him into shelter behind the SUV and took the ICER that Trip held out to her.

'May! Coulson!' she screamed, chancing a look over the SUV's bonnet.

She saw the two running back to the Bus, taking fire from a large group of soldiers all dressed in black.

'Dammit,' Trip hissed behind her, and immediately began giving them cover fire, and Skye joined him after a moment's hesitation.

May and Coulson ran along the tarmac, and they were almost at the Bus's ramp when one of the soldiers threw something that clattered at the bottom of the ramp.

'GRENADE!' May shrieked, and she and Coulson dove over Lola's hood and took shelter just as the grenade blew.

Skye pushed Trip off of her, and looked to Fitz and Simmons, who were both looking a lot paler than usual. 'You two okay?'

'I've been better, if I'm honest,' Fitz said frankly.

'Have you got more ICERS?' Simmons asked.

Trip passed her one, while Fitz fished one out of his backpack.

May and Coulson scrambled around to their side of the SUV, looking a little worse for wear but still alive.

'There's at least three dozen,' Coulson panted. 'They're HYDRA. This was a setup to get us away from our backup and take us out. They know that we're the point team. They know that we're who they need to take out to take us down.'

'I _told_ you that you didn't need to come on this trip, Coulson,' May said lowly.

'I know, and this is definitely on me,' Coulson agreed. 'But there's nothing we can do about that now, unless Fitz has whipped up a time machine in his spare time?'

'Those plans are only theoretical for a reason, sir,' Fitz protested.

Skye spared a glance at him before turning back to firing her ICER, taking down HYDRA soldiers only for them to be replaced by more. 'You have plans for a time machine?'

'Of course I have, it's the Holy Grail for any physicist and engineer,' Fitz protested, reloading an ICER with fumbling fingers.

'It's also shaped like a telephone box from London in the 1950s and he's continually trying to come up with a name for it that has initials that spell "TARDIS",' Simmons informed them, ducking for cover while she changed out the cartridges in her ICER.

'There's just an acre of these fellas, isn't there?' Trip yelled over the sound of gunfire.

'They're not stopping!' Fitz shrieked, and it was true, every HYDRA agent that they took down was dragged to the back by their comrades and their places taken by someone else.

'We need something that takes down a lot of them at once,' Coulson panted out, only loud enough for the team to hear him above the sound of HYDRA's machine guns.

'Well, they're obviously not super-soldiers-'

'The ICER rounds are taking them down-'

'I'm assuming you don't want lethal violence-'

'Reverse-engineering isn't an exact science-'

'They haven't been field-tested yet-'

'We don't know if they'd work like the Cybertek ones do-'

'The quantities of dendrotoxin are questionable at best-'

'But they'd definitely do what we need them to do-'

'Yes, we've got something,' Simmons finally finished Fitz's last sentence, looking over at Coulson. 'But it hasn't been field-tested yet.'

'The dendrotoxin grenades?' Trip asked, casting an ICER cartridge to the floor and sliding in a new one.

'This can _be_ the field test,' Coulson said. 'Do it.'

Fitz pulled one out of his backpack and exchanged a glance with Simmons before twisting the canister in half and lobbing it into the centre of the HYDRA squad. There was a pause, and then a _whoosh_, and when the team dared to peek over the bonnet of the car, there was half a squad of confused HYDRA soldiers on the ground.

'Not enough dendrotoxin, I'll make a note of that,' Simmons whispered, right before Trip shoved both her and Skye down to the floor when one of the recovering soldiers got his hands on a gun and took a clumsy shot.

Trip cursed softly, and both Skye and Simmons looked up to see blood streaming from a bullet graze to the lower arm.

'Oh, God,' Simmons groaned, immediately applying pressure to the wound and giving Fitz directions to get the first aid kit, while Skye took Trip's abandoned ICER and, now with an ICER in each hand, joined Coulson and May in shooting at the quickly regrouping soldiers.

'We're not getting out of this, are we?' Skye asked them.

Neither answered, but the perspiration beading on Coulson's forehead and the short but noticeable tremor in May's gun arm was more than enough as an answer.

She gritted her teeth and began firing over the bonnet of the car again, but no matter how fast or well they shot, HYDRA kept advancing, and soon they were almost on the cargo ramp.

'Well, I never really saw myself going down in a blaze of gunfire,' Simmons said conversationally, sinking down to sit next to Fitz, their backs to the car, as she tried to tend to Trip's wound as best as she could while he insisted on continuing fighting. 'Oh, Trip, would you stay still for a minute?'

'When they told us we'd been assigned to the field, this is _exactly_ how I saw myself going down,' Fitz said grumpily, passing the specialist a new ICER magazine.

'Oh, you're not still going on about how we'd regret this decision are you?' Simmons groaned. 'That was two years ago, Fitz.'

'And we're still regretting it, Simmons!' Fitz protested, waving his hands about and narrowly missing getting shot.

'Just think, if you'd been in the Triskelion or the Hub or the Academy, you'd already be dead,' Trip offered helpfully before bobbing up to empty the cartridge in his ICER and then dropped back down again. 'I'm running out of ammunition. I'm gonna have to start using live bullets soon if we don't come up with something that gets us out of this.'

'Thanks, Trip, for that image,' Fitz said, making a face. It was, however, true. The vast majority of SHIELD scientists that hadn't either already been HYDRA or turned sides at the takeover were dead and buried, names carved into a crude version of the Wall of Valour in the Playground.

'We need backup,' Coulson panted.

'The nearest SHIELD team is three hours away, Coulson, they'd never make it in time,' May told him, stony faced.

'Just send out the call,' he said.

'I already did.'

They exchanged a significant glance before returning to the fray.

'How are we doing for ammo?' May yelled at Trip.

'I'm on my last two mags,' he yelled back.

'Me too,' she called.

'Last one for me,' Coulson said as he changed to a fresh magazine. 'There are too many. May, if you got to the cockpit, do you think you could-'

'Anything I do leaves you vulnerable,' May said.

'Skye?' Coulson asked desperately.

'What are you looking at me for?' she asked. 'As 0-8-4s go, I'm useless!'

'Is there anything you can hack, or exploit?' May asked breathlessly.

'These are plain, normal men. They are not robots. I cannot hack people, guys,' Skye said before swearing under her breath as a bullet whizzed by her head, missing her by inches, and dropping to the ground behind the SUV.

'I'm out,' Trip said, sinking down, his back to the car as he switched his ICER out for something a little more lethal.

Coulson sent a desperate look in May's direction, but she simply dropped her also useless ICERs and took cover as well, a pistol in each hand. She gave him a knowing look and handed one of them over. He sighed and took it, tucking the ICERs away in their proper places on his person.

'So, um… it's been real,' Trip said, looking around at the team huddled behind the black SUV.

'Real what?' Simmons asked, confused.

Skye let out a watery laugh. 'This kind of, really sucks. I don't wanna die.'

'I don't want to die _again_,' Coulson said, which made Skye burst into laughter.

'I don't wanna die at all,' Simmons whispered.

Suddenly, a figure dressed all in black holding the Night-Night rifle in one hand and a strangely familiar looking canister in the other soared off of the balcony above them and landed on the roof of the SUV. It didn't pause, just jumped off of the roof of the car and into the middle of the skirmish, pressing a hidden button on the side of the canister so that a long spear seemed to telescopically extend from it.

May was the first to realise what was about to happen.

'Get down!' she yelled, pushing Coulson and Skye down and motioning for the others to do the same.

A massive shockwave blew through the Bus' cargo ramp, rushing over the SHIELD teams' heads' and forcing the HYDRA operatives onto the ground and into unconsciousness.

The man in black rose to his feet, but was immediately assaulted by the remaining dozen HYDRA soldiers that had been too far away from the epicentre of the shockwave to be properly knocked out. He knocked out the first two with the spear he'd used to activate the shockwave device, but it was wrestled away from him by the third, who was repaid with a heavy blow to the head with the butt of the Night-Night rifle. The next two were taken out by bullets from the Night-Night rifle, but the man then cursed and used the rifle to bludgeon the next soldier into unconsciousness, seemingly out of ammo.

(Fitz squeaked in protest at that.)

The next HYDRA soldier that ran at the man in black got a lucky punch at the man's face, so that he had to pause to spit out a mouthful of blood before wrestling briefly with the soldier and breaking his neck, dropping him to the floor. The next two came at him at the same time, but he'd managed to snag a knife from the soldier whose neck he'd broken, and they both fell in short order bleeding from incapacitating-but-not-fatal wounds.

The dark clothed man was, however, so occupied with disabling those two opponents that he failed to notice the third soldier creeping up behind him until he was knocked down by a blow to the back of the head. He lay prone for a second before rolling over, narrowly missing being shot in the head by a bullet from the last soldier's lethal-looking gun. He was up on his knees in a moment, and then on one knee, and he swiped at the soldier's leg with his knife, but she dodged it deftly. She raised her gun and aimed it at him, clearly meaning to kill him. Suddenly, though, there was a muffled "whoomph" and the sound of a body hitting the floor. He looked over at the unconscious soldier, whose forehead still faintly glowed blue from the ICER round, and then over at the SUV, where the muzzle of an ICER and the top half of Skye's face was barely visible. He gave her a quick nod before turning to clear the room, which was finally still, though crowded with the unconscious bodies of HYDRA soldiers.

Slowly, the team rose to its feet. Simmons, Fitz and Trip peered over the top of the car, while May, Coulson and Skye crept around the bonnet to the figure that was still kneeling in the centre of a mass of unconscious enemy bodies. The dark head rose to reveal a familiar face.

'Ward,' Skye whispered.

He didn't say anything, merely stared gravely at their faces.

'It really _was_ you, all that time,' May said, almost disbelievingly. The only person who believed that Ward was their mysterious saviour _less_ than May was Coulson. 'New York. Chicago. Boston… Beijing.'

Skye, Trip, Fitz and Simmons all did a double-take at the mention of Beijing, unaware that there had been a mission there, let alone that May's life had required saving.

'I just needed to try… to try to clean up my mess,' Ward said quietly.

Coulson took a few steps forward, tucking his pistol into a holster. 'I have to ask, Ward, why?' he asked. 'After everything we did to you… after everything I ordered done to you, why would you then… protect us?'

'I… At first, I felt like I owed you something,' Ward said quietly, placing the blood knife carefully on the floor out of reach of anyone, and then rising to his feet. 'I mean, sure, letting me go was an order from the WSC, but you didn't have to obey orders. You could have kept me locked up in the bottom of a base somewhere, you could have forged documents for me, you could have tried to dig up the paper documents on me… you could have put a bullet in my head.'

Fitz, Simmons and Skye all flinched at that, while Trip and Coulson remained steadily calm, but a darting of May's eyes to the ground and then back up to meet his confirmed Ward's words.

'But you didn't,' he said softly. 'You let me go, and after I helped Fury, I felt as though I owed you. Something… something Raina said.'

_Don't you owe a man like that something?_

Coulson looked over the younger man with a steady eye before turning to Skye and tilting his head in an approximation of a nod.

'Well, we should get this all cleaned up and get ready for departure,' he said briskly, looking at the other four agents.

'Right. HYDRA agents all over the cargo ramp,' Simmons observed.

'That would probably inhibit take-off a bit,' Trip quipped lightly.

May nodded solemnly at Ward, who silently nodded back, before padding quietly upstairs, presumably to the cockpit to get ready for take-off.

Trip made a face at the bodies strewn across the cargo ramp.

'This is gonna take forever,' he grumbled, bending to grab one of the closer soldiers under the arms and dragging him down the cargo ramp, his feet trailing on the floor. FitzSimmons grabbed another soldier, each taking an arm, and followed Trip to where he seemed to be making a pile of unconscious HYDRA soldiers, Coulson following suit.

Skye slowly walked a little closer to Ward before drawing to a stop a couple of metres away.

'Hi,' she said quietly.

'Hi,' he replied, just as quietly.

There was an awkward silence, filled only by the sound of FitzSimmons pulling a HYDRA soldier by his feet, his head dragging against the steel and leaving what would probably be quite a painful bruise on the back of his head. Skye examined the tops of her shoes while Ward watched the team dragging soldiers, apparently fascinated.

'So, um… what've you been up to?' she asked finally.

'Oh, you know… stuff,' he said lamely, scuffing the toe of one boot against the floor.

'Oh. Good. That's… good. Stuff is… good… I should… I should probably stop…'

'Stop babbling?' Trip interrupted as he walked past them to collect the HYDRA soldier that Skye had stopped from shooting Ward.

'I was gonna say… stop saying good.' Skye trailed off into a confused silence.

'Um… how've you been?' Ward asked awkwardly.

'Like you don't know, Mr Following-From-A-Distance,' she snorted, before blushing in embarrassment. 'Sorry.'

'What for? Your blunt honesty is something I've missed. I'm not entirely sure why, but I did miss it,' Ward said with a half-smile.

'I, um… I missed you,' she whispered.

He looked at her with the same half-smile. 'I missed you too.'

'Just kiss her already!' Fitz yelled from the bottom of the ramp, where he, Simmons, Fitz and Coulson had gathered to kind-of-not-obviously-but-totally-obviously eavesdrop.

(For master spies, they were surprisingly terrible at that.)

Skye flipped him off.

'Do you…? Do you wanna be kissed? Because I don't think-' Ward began, stumbling nervously over the words.

'No, no! No kissing over here, thank you,' Skye quickly cut him down.

'Oh.'

Another awkward silence.

'This is _really_ awkward,' Skye finally said.

'Yeah,' Ward agreed, relieved that someone had said it.

'Yup,' someone over in the group by the ramp also agreed, but both Skye and Ward ignored them.

Ward raised a hand to the back of his head and ruffled the hair there. 'So, um… I was thinking.'

'I'm guessing that was back during that silence back there, right?' Skye deadpanned.

He cracked a smile, a proper one this time.

'How about we start again? Like we said last time we talked,' he suggested. 'I know we can't start _again,_ again, because we both have way too much baggage to make that work, and you already know about my past and well, however much you know about your past is about as much as _I_ know about your past, and then there's the whole HYDRA thing, but-'

'Yes,' she said, cutting off his rambling. 'Yeah, let's start again.' She grinned brightly at him, and he smiled shyly back.

'Hi.'

'Hi.'

Suddenly, two figures flew up to them and attached themselves to Ward. Ward jumped, and Skye swore she spotted fear in his eyes before he realised what was actually happening, which was FitzSimmons, hugging him rather enthusiastically.

They both immediately began babbling at him, but instead of ignoring them, as the Agent Ward that the team had known had been prone to do, he gave them almost his full attention, nodding at the bits that he understood and squinting or shaking his head when they said something too fast, or something that he didn't understand. Simmons clucked at the wounds he'd sustained in the previous fight and began to try and drag him into the lab to fix him up, while Fitz continued to tell him about the new ICER design that he'd thought up. Trip, on his way to collect the last couple of HYDRA soldiers for dumping outside, clapped Ward on the shoulder as he passed them, and received a smile in return.

'Ward.' Coulson was now standing next to a smiling Skye. 'Come back with us. Come back to SHIELD.'

Uncertainty flickered over Ward's features, even as FitzSimmons fell silent.

'If I'm honest sir… I don't think I'm ready.'

FitzSimmons' and Skye's faces fell at that, while May, who had been coming down the stairs to help with the HYDRA-disposal, paused halfway down the stairs.

Coulson walked towards him, and FitzSimmons quietly moved away from him. Coulson raised a hand, but only to slowly lower it onto the shoulder of the taller man in a soft pat.

'Grant. That's exactly how I know that you _are_ ready.'

He hesitated, just for a moment, and for that moment, his gaze lingered on Fitz. And then he nodded.

'Okay.'

Coulson smiled, while Skye bounced on the spot and FitzSimmons hugged him again. Trip patted the other specialist on the back, while May finally came down the stairs with the same inscrutable expression on her face as always.

'Wheels up in three,' she said, hitting the button that closed the cargo ramp, hiding the rather large pile of HYDRA soldiers form view, before heading back up the stairs. Coulson followed her, with Trip and Simmons on his tail, Trip saying something about celebrating.

Skye smiled at Ward before motioning for him to precede her up the stairs, but he shook his head with a smile and nodded for her to go ahead, waiting for Fitz to put away the much-abused Night-Night rifle before joining him at the base of the staircase.

'Ask it,' Ward said with a smile.

'Why'd you look at me?' Fitz asked. 'When you were making your decision? Why me? Why not Skye, or Coulson?'

Ward looked around the cargo bay, bullet ridden, the two cars looking very worse for wear, mildly bloodstained, and smiled.

'You remember what I said to you, last time we were here?' he asked.

'You weren't looking to fight a war. You just wanted to survive,' Fitz said.

Ward nodded. 'Well now… now, I don't just want to survive. I want to live.'

Fitz grinned widely at that, and clapped Ward on the shoulder heartily. 'Well come on, then! We've got us some living to do!'

Ward laughed as he followed the Scotsman up the stairs into the Bus as it rumbled into life.

_Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival._

_C.S. Lewis_

::

**So, um, yeah… that's that, really.**

**If you liked it, please don't hesitate to favourite or review. If you have some CONSTRUCTIVE criticism, please review. **

**XD PurpleHipposRock**


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